When Liberty trembled

Statue's torch has been closed since 1916 sabotage at Lehigh Valley Railroad pier

July 04, 2009|By Frank Warner OF THE MORNING CALL

When the Statue of Liberty's crown is reopened to the public today for the first time since 9/11, the monument's torch will remain closed as it has been since a little-remembered attack on the United States during World War I.

On July 30, 1916, German saboteurs blew up Europe-bound munitions at a Jersey City, N.J., dock owned by the Lehigh Valley Railroad.

The explosions rocked the Statue of Liberty across New York Harbor. Rivets popped in the statue's raised arm.

"The Army immediately closed the torch down," according to Barry Moreno, the librarian of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. "With the war on in Europe and the sabotage of the Lehigh Valley Railroad munitions dock, the war seemed to be getting closer and closer. The Army was more interested in security."

The event that shut off public access to the right arm and torch is largely ignored in history classes and at the Statue of Liberty itself. Moreno said that when the crown opens again today, the public will see no exhibits about the 1916 explosion.

"The subject doesn't come up too often," said Moreno, who regularly talks with the public about the history of the statue and Ellis Island. "It only comes up when someone wants to know why the torch is closed."

At one time, most Americans knew about it. The day after the blast, it was front-page news from coast to coast.

The obliterated pier was known as Black Tom Island, but it hadn't been an island for at least 10 years. The Lehigh Valley Railroad had joined the island to Jersey City with earth and construction debris.

When a mysterious series of pier fires set off the munitions at 2:08 a.m., the first explosion was devastating.

"Every window in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, on Bedloe's Island opposite Black Tom, was broken, and the main door, made of iron and weighing almost a ton, was blown off its hinges," The Morning Call reported. "The statue itself, however, was not damaged, except from the rain of shrapnel which bespattered it."

Loaded on 85 rail cars and a barge, 2 million pounds of dynamite, TNT, gunpowder and shells exploded.

Plate-glass windows shattered throughout Lower Manhattan. The Brooklyn Bridge shook. Reports conflict, but at least three men -- a railroad guard, a police officer and a barge captain -- and a baby boy thrown from his Jersey City crib were killed.

At the Statue of Liberty, 100 rivets popped on Miss Liberty's extended arm, but the lighted torch did not dim.

A good target

The Black Tom Island pier was the latest expansion of the Lehigh Valley Railroad. In the harbor two-thirds of a mile west of the Statue of Liberty, the mile-long dock was the company's link to New England and Europe.

The railroad, built by Lehigh University founder Asa Packer, started in the 1850s with tracks from Easton to the Allentown area and to Pennsylvania's coal mines. In 1916, it was a major rail company, with lines that reached Buffalo, N.Y., and New York City.

Black Tom Island was a sprawling complex, and in 1916, as German submarine attacks slowed Atlantic commerce, it was overflowing with munitions and other goods for the Allies -- principally Britain and France.

Black Tom Island was a good target for saboteurs, Moreno said. The damage, worth about $400 million today, was proof of that. After World War I, an investigation determined that a Bayonne, N.J., man working for Germany carried out at least part of the sabotage and two pier guards had been paid off by German agents.

In 1939, a German-American Mixed Claims Commission found Germany responsible for the damage, and in 1953 Germany agreed to pay the Lehigh Valley Railroad $50 million.

The railroad, which went out of business in 1976, was not the only Lehigh Valley business affected by the explosion. According to Allentown historian Frank Whelan, many of the munitions destroyed in the blast almost certainly were manufactured by Bethlehem Steel in Bethlehem and Traylor Engineering in Allentown.

Whelan said even in the Lehigh Valley, a region of isolationists with a large German-speaking population, the incident bolstered support for direct U.S. involvement in the Allies' war against Germany.

"It began to shift the thinking of a lot of people," he said. "The Black Tom explosion said the Germans could be saboteurs and spies. The Germans could be coming to America." The United States entered the war April 6, 1917.

For Whelan, the 1916 explosion also had a personal side. His grandfather, Edward D. Whelan, was in New York City that night.

"My grandfather at the time of the explosion was in a Manhattan hospital, and they evacuated him," he said. "They told him the Germans had blown up the pier and they might have hit the Statue of Liberty, and they were afraid they were going to do something else."